#FactCheck- Doctored Audio in News18 Video Fuels False ‘Operation Sindoor’ Claim
Executive Summary
A video clip bearing the logo of News18 is being widely shared on social media with the claim that a serving Indian Army brigadier and his son were attacked in Delhi by an RSS-supporting mob for criticising the government over “Operation Sindoor.” The clip features an anchor allegedly explaining the motive behind the assault. However, research by the CyberPeace Research Wing found the claim to be false. The viral video has been digitally manipulated, with its audio altered to include misleading information.
Claim
An X user (@Mohammad776157) shared a video clip from Network18 on April 13, claiming that a serving Indian Army brigadier and his son were attacked in Delhi by an RSS-supporting mob for criticising the government over “Operation Sindoor.”
- https://x.com/Mohammad776157/status/2043691737609347166?s=20
- https://archive.ph/5EpbJ
To verify the claim, we extracted multiple keyframes from the viral video using the InVid tool and conducted reverse image searches via Google Lens. The same clip was found circulating across several social media platforms with similar claims.
- https://www.facebook.com/reel/2397972117364665
- https://www.instagram.com/reels/DXE4FFdjcnq/
- https://archive.ph/hjG3b
- https://archive.ph/9IkTY
Fact Check
Since the video carried the News18 logo, we examined the outlet’s official social media handles. We found the original video on its X account, where the visuals matched the viral clip. However, a detailed analysis of the original footage showed that the anchor never stated that the brigadier and his son were attacked for criticising the government over “Operation Sindoor.”
In the authentic version, the anchor reported that the assault took place in Delhi’s Vasant Enclave after the brigadier objected to two individuals consuming alcohol inside a car parked outside his residence. This clearly indicates that the audio in the viral clip was tampered with to insert a false narrative.
For further verification, we extracted the audio segment from the viral clip and analysed it using Resemble AI. The tool indicated that the portion describing the motive behind the attack had been digitally manipulated.
Conclusion
The viral claim is false. The video has been altered by modifying its audio to mislead viewers. In reality, the assault was not related to “Operation Sindoor” but occurred after the brigadier objected to public drinking near his residence.
Related Blogs
Executive Summary
A claim is being shared on social media alleging that two women were shot dead and their homes were set on fire in Manipur. The post alleges that the Indian Army carried out the attack on the orders of Lieutenant General V. M. Bhuvana Krishnan, Commander of the Eastern Command. CyberPeace Research found the claim to be false. According to available reports, suspected militants attacked a hill village in Manipur’s Kangpokpi district. During an exchange of fire with security forces, the attackers set at least two houses on fire.
Claim:
The Indian Army, on the orders of Eastern Command Commander Lieutenant General V. M. Bhuvana Krishnan, shot two women in Manipur and set their homes on fire, following which the situation in the state deteriorated severely.
https://x.com/indiantiwari01/status/2100204995425743103?s=20
https://archive.ph/SOm7I
Fact Check
To verify the viral claim, we conducted a Google search using relevant keywords. During the search, we found a report published on The Times of India website on September 16, 2026. According to the report, suspected militants attacked a hill village in Manipur’s Kangpokpi district on Tuesday night and set at least two houses on fire. Security forces engaged the attackers in an exchange of fire during the incident.According to officials, a large number of militants armed with sophisticated weapons attacked Chawangkining Naga village at around 10:30 p.m. on Tuesday. The attack took place hours after two Kuki women were shot dead at Leisangphai village in neighbouring Tamenglong district.CRPF personnel deployed in the nearby area returned fire, triggering intermittent firing that continued for nearly six hours until around 4:30 a.m. on Wednesday.An official said, “Intermittent firing was reported for nearly six hours till 4:30 a.m. on Wednesday. The CRPF returned fire, preventing the militants from entering the village.” He added that two wooden houses on the outskirts of the village were nevertheless set ablaze.
As part of our further investigation, we conducted a reverse image search of keyframes from the video. During the search, we found the visuals from the viral video on the YouTube channel of @ukhrultimes. According to the accompanying information, intermittent firing continued for nearly six hours in Chawangkining Naga village in Manipur’s Kangpokpi district on the night of September 15, 2026. During the incident, two houses on the outskirts of the village were completely burnt down, while several others were damaged.According to local reports, suspected militants targeted the village despite the deployment of CRPF personnel in the area and engaged in an exchange of fire with security forces. Meanwhile, the Liangmai Naga Council, Manipur (LNC-M), condemned the attack and alleged that suspected Kuki militants operating from the Songtung Suspension of Operations (SoO) camp were behind the firing. However, these allegations regarding the identity of the attackers should be reported as allegations and should not be presented as independently verified facts.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/QuZ2FoLyA5A
At the end of our investigation, we found a report published on The Hindu website on September 16, 2026. According to the report, officials said that suspected militants had attacked Chawangkining Naga village in Manipur’s Kangpokpi district. During the attack, they engaged in an exchange of fire with security forces and set at least two houses on the outskirts of the village on fire. The report quoted an official as saying that a large number of militants armed with sophisticated weapons attacked the village at around 10:30 p.m. on September 15. The incident took place hours after two Kuki women were shot dead in Leisangphai village in neighbouring Tamenglong district.
Conclusion
Our investigation revealed that separate incidents of the killing of two women and the burning of their houses in Manipur are being falsely shared on social media, claiming them to be actions taken by the Indian Army. According to available reports, on September 15, 2026, two Kuki women were shot dead by unidentified armed assailants in Leisangphai village, Tamenglong district. On the same night, suspected militants attacked Chawangkining Naga village, Kangpokpi district. Security forces exchanged fire, and two houses on the outskirts of the village were set on fire. No credible report has confirmed the links between these incidents and the orders of the Indian Army or Eastern Command Commander Lieutenant General V.M. Bhuvana Krishnan. Therefore, the claim that the Indian Army shot two women and set their houses on fire by linking the two incidents is false and misleading.
Introduction
By the morning of May 19, 2026, many Indians woke up to see a worrying message being circulated on WhatsApp and X (formerly Twitter) stating that the government proposed to appropriate all gold stored in the temples, convert it to cash by some new scheme, and further, regard temple towers, doors, etc., gilded with gold as the "Strategic Gold Reserves of India." The panic spread immediately; religious communities were enraged, and online arguments broke out. By afternoon, the rumour was out of control. The catch was that this whole thing was false.
The Rise of Misinformation: An Old Problem with a New Engine
Misinformation is an ancient phenomenon. Folk scholars have observed for centuries that fabrications, rumours, and hoaxes move through the same channels and follow the same patterns as reliable news, deriving their credibility from repetition rather than proof and relying on social networks for believability.
A seminal 2017 study published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives by Allcott and Gentzkow discovered that fake news articles were far more widely shared than the most popular legitimate news articles in the run-up to the 2016 United States presidential election. The study additionally discovered that nearly 62% of all American adults get at least a fraction of their news through social media, a reality the researchers posited would allow fake news to spread wide and far through unvetted channels.
India is an even more extreme case; on a platform such as WhatsApp, where researcher Kiran Garimella, working for MIT, estimates that 50 billion messages are transmitted every single day in India alone, misinformation is less something that spreads and more something that simply exists.
The Science of Viral Misinformation
The temple gold rumour took a course typical of conspiracy theories. A dramatic, provocative rumour that simultaneously appealed to religious, state, and financial safety was received by an audience already conditioned to mistrust its leaders. In Science, 2018, MIT researchers Vosoughi, Roy, and Aral mapped the very mechanism at scale: it revealed false information to propagate about six times more than true information, reaching about three times as many people. The study further concluded that falsehoods were 70% more likely to be shared than true stories and that the 'engine' of false information spread was not bots and algorithms but humans. The simple reason was that humans prefer something that is novel, surprising, and alarming.
Pariser further elaborated this process within his book Filter Bubble; as algorithms mainly show users what conforms with their existing beliefs, people are put in individual echo chambers, and their tendency to share emotional or falsified content results in corrections often failing to keep up.
The Importance of Fact-Checking and Official Sources
The government reacted to this with a swift and concise response, and an official statement released by the Ministry of Finance on 19 May 2026 cautioned citizens that all legal government policies are declared only through official press releases, government websites, and appropriate agencies and not via social media forwards.
India has a dedicated institutional resource for exactly this purpose. The PIB Fact Check Unit (FCU), established in November 2019 under the Press Information Bureau, has now published over 2,900 fact-checks covering false claims about government policies, schemes, deepfakes, AI-generated content, fabricated notifications, and fraudulent websites. Citizens can submit suspicious content directly to the FCU via WhatsApp (+91 8799711259) or through factcheck.pib.gov.in: The service is free, confidential, and designed to be accessible.
The Risks of Sharing Unverified Information
Beyond confusion and unnecessary anxiety, the spread of unverified information carries concrete risks. Allcott and Gentzkow's research found that individuals who consumed more ideologically homogeneous information were substantially more likely to believe false headlines, a pattern that holds regardless of education or political affiliation.
In India, where WhatsApp research has documented that approximately 13% of images shared in politically active groups constitute known misinformation, the consequences have at times extended well beyond digital confusion.
Advisory for Citizens: Verify, Inoculate, and Share Responsibly
Becoming responsible digital citizens is more than just exercising passive vigilance. An important concept every digital citizen ought to know was formulated by John Cook, Stephan Lewandowsky, and Ullrich Ecker in a 2017 PLOS ONE paper: it is called "prebunking."
Debunking seeks to counter a falsehood once it is believed, while prebunking builds resilience in advance of the exposure, similar to how a vaccine inoculates the body to protect against a disease. Prebunking is implemented through an inoculation technique wherein individuals are warned about the presence of likely future misinformation, about the subject and the typical manipulative tactics that the misinformation may use. Exposure, even in an attenuated form, arms individuals with the wherewithal to recognise and disregard the actual misinformation once it appears. What this means in practice is that informed, aware citizens, capable of analysing how misinformation is crafted, are unlikely to fall for a new rumour of this nature.
What should be kept in mind?
- Wait before sharing: A prompt sense of fear, anger, or desire to share a post is not a call to immediate dissemination but an exercise in caution.
- Prebunk yourself and others: Be mindful of subjects that persistently generate falsehoods like government schemes, religious matters, economic policy, and national security.
- Refer to official sources only: The authenticity of claims related to any government scheme can be cross-checked on PIB.gov.in, relevant ministries, or the PIB Fact Check WhatsApp number, 8799711259.
- Identify filter bubbles: Repeated confirmation of your own beliefs and concerns indicates an algorithmic bubble.
- Do not amplify ambiguity: Circulating information merely as a matter of cautious verification has damaging repercussions.
- Rectify what has been shared: Issue the correction to the same recipients as the false information.
Conclusion
The swift clarifications issued by the government in May 2026 and fact-check systems by PIB have helped contain the panic, but the role of the government cannot be seen as the sole bulwark against misinformation. An informed citizenry, digitally and information literate to such an extent that they know how misinformation is created and circulated, is our strongest defence against fake news. It is not only the ability to fact-check but also to detect manipulative attempts before misinformation goes viral. Check before you share. Stop before you panic. When in doubt, check the PIB Fact Check.
References
[3] https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2247720
[4] Allcott, Hunt and Matthew Gentzkow. (2017). "Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election." Journal of Economic Perspectives 31(2): 211–23
[5] Vosoughi, Soroush, Deb Roy, and Sinan Aral. (2018). "The Spread of True and False News Online." Science 359(6380): 1146–1151
[6] Cook, John, Stephan Lewandowsky, and Ullrich K. H. Ecker. (2017). "Neutralizing misinformation through inoculation: Exposing misleading argumentation techniques reduces their influence." PLOS ONE 12(5): e0175799.
[7] Garimella, Kiran and Dean Eckles. (2020/2023). "Images and Misinformation in Political Groups: Evidence from WhatsApp in India.
[8] Christakis, Nicholas A. and James H. Fowler. (2011). Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives.
[9] Pariser, Eli. (2011/2012). The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You.
Executive Summary
A video circulating widely on social media claims to show a pilot of the Indian Air Force (IAF) crying and expressing fear about flying fighter jets, allegedly citing poor maintenance and frequent crashes. The clip is being linked to the crash of an IAF Sukhoi-30 fighter jet in Assam on March 5, in which two pilots lost their lives. In the viral video, a man dressed like a pilot is seen speaking emotionally, saying that flying fighter jets has become frightening due to lack of maintenance and repeated accidents. Several users are sharing the clip claiming that the man in the video is an IAF pilot revealing the reality behind aircraft crashes. However, research by the CyberPeace found the claim to be false. The video does not depict a real pilot or an actual incident. Instead, it appears to be an AI-generated clip created and circulated with the intent to spread misinformation.
Claim:
An Instagram user, ‘samacharsaar0’, shared the viral video on March 10, 2026, with the English caption: “2300 aircraft crashes, 1300 pilots dead: A major challenge before the IAF.”
- Source: :https://www.instagram.com/reel/DVqa4lNiYJQ
- Archived link::https://perma.cc/EUZ8-DHE3
Fact Check:
The claim was also debunked by PIB Fact Check. While verifying the viral video, PIB clarified that the clip is artificially generated and not related to any real IAF personnel.
To further verify the authenticity of the video, we analyzed it using AI detection tools. The tool Hive Moderation indicated a 99.9% probability that the video was generated using artificial intelligence.
We also examined the clip using another AI detection platform, Undetectable. The analysis suggested an 82% likelihood that the video was created with AI tools. The tool also indicated the possibility that the footage may have been generated using the Sora AI video generation tool.
Conclusion
Our research concludes that the viral video of a crying “pilot” is not authentic. The clip has been created using artificial intelligence and is being misleadingly shared as a real Indian Air Force pilot speaking about aircraft crashes. The government has also denied the claim associated with the video.
